A Program Implies A Programmer
by AKissAndAGunshot
Summary: a computer prodigy doesn't need to wait for a Zionite to jack him out.


/storyteller: holy crap! Well look at that, I have been alive these past months. I know, I need to update my other stories... but school is a bitch and I haven't had time to look for inspiration. I just write what I can. So now you get this.

The title of this is an adaption of a saying I picked up long ago: 'An Artifact Implies An Artificer'. What happens in the matrix when a computer prodigy comes along?

Also, I apologize profusely to any actual computer scientists or programmers whom I have offended with my relentless technobabble. I am well aware that computers Do Not Work Like That.

And by the way, my descriptions ramble like an insane politician.

X-X-X

A Program Implies A Programmer

X-X-X

The wind howled through forgotten ruins, carrying bitter snow that never melted and ash from fires long dead.

Somewhere amongst the ancient rubble and wreckage, a lone soul labored his way to a suitable location.

The boy, for he could not have been more than seventeen years old, crawled under a rock. This close to machine territory, he wished he could have dug a small burrow, but time would not permit such a luxury.

He brushed his long hair, eight years' growth, back over his ear. Then he took out a small object and bit down hard on it.

He found himself, inexplicably, in a completely dark room. A tiny circle of lamplight illuminated a desk. He walked over and started typing commands into the computer.

The scenery morphed again. He was in new York city, 1999. Or so it seemed.

He put on a very special pair of glasses and gloves: these were the equivalent of his badge of office. Without these, he was merely Nathaniel Graves, although he would never even consider jacking in without loading them to his simulacra.

With them, he was one of the greatest threats to the machine world: The Technomancer.

With the overlay of the glasses, everything gleamed with irridescent green streams of information. He could even see important underlying data; he had once escaped an agent because he could see a in-port protocol appearing. Seconds later, the agent had teleported in.

The gloves, though... they were a masterpiece. His left glove was loaded with logic spikes, rainbow tables, inverted approachers, decompilers and even brute force crackers for when the going got tough, and was capable of handling and manipulating simulation data that would have been off-limits to many agents. The left glove was his tool.

His right glove was a storage and deployment device: it contained thousands of blueprints for weapons he liked to use. Corruption grenades, glitch darts, logic spikes in the form of daggers, recursion gas shells (recursion didn't result in immediate automatic deletion the way corruption did, but it paralysed everything it touched, it could replicate easily, and it eventually resulted in a 'corrupted' tag), and even a few types of direct deleters. At a command, his right glove could resolve a data weapon - or a normal weapon, if such took his fancy - out of nothing.

Also, the pair shielded his own simulacrum from the various and sometimes exotic forms of data he deployed as a weapon at almost every turn. Of course, corruption, deleters, or darker things were the only really effective weapon that existed against agents, but they worked very well. He had in the past killed three agents at once with a simple index error.

Unfortunately, he was merely the Technomancer. He was not The One. He could not intuitively manipulate the data streams the way someone like Neo could; his power came from his finesse and skill in usage of foreign programs, rather than speedy bending of existing code.

So, he had to rely on reflexes, an itchy trigger finger, serious preparation and at worst, his rather ingenious killswitch, to get him out alive.

X-X-X

Technomancer grabbed a passing particle of World data. "/query?:#: coordinated origin point," he said.

The particle promptly spat out its point of origin as well as a warning about how random simulation manipulation was running a very, very slight risk of a crash.

Technomancer smiled. He knew he was nearly there. He had been following data streams in reverse for two months now, and finally, after several instances of losing the trail or hitting a dead end, he knew that he was at last approaching his goal: one of the many elusive servers that the Machines ran the matrix on.

He pulled a flickering green cube from his pocket. Upon its pressing, he found himself teleported away.

X-X-X

Crash. Sparks flew everywhere.

The sentinel thrashed and swung its metallic tentacles, tearing the hole even wider. The Zionite ship, the 'Confidence', was doomed. Blood already coated the inside like paint; it was only a matter of time before the ship was no more than a tomb.

Shard, however, wasn't planning on dying with a full clip.

She loaded up her assault rifle. It was a thing of beauty; a Longshot mk 5 'murderous intent'. Though it was a pre-war model, it had been modified to fire EMP discharge rounds, making it an effective weapon against the sentinels.

With a screech, the sentinel finally ripped the hull wide open. Shard swung around the corner of her cover, firing.

Blue sparks cascaded off the sentinel's carapace. It squealed and convulsed, but didn't slow.

Quick as lightning, she grabbed one of the few shaped-charge shells, clipping it to the end of her rifle. Such shells were very rare and expensive, but they got the job done.

She fired.

The sentinel screeched as the concentrated force of the explosion ripped through its shell. It collapsed, twitched for a few minutes, and then died.

Shard stood, leaving her hiding place. Though the sentinel was dead, the damage had been done. The crew were all dead except for herself, and the 'Confidence' was little more than a smoking wreck. Its repulsors had failed long ago and it had crashed to the ground. There was no hope of flying home.

She checked the map system with what little power remained in the wreck. She cursed loudly.

The 'Confidence' had been ambushed in a service tunnel. This tunnel, however, did not lead back to Zion as most tunnels did. One end of the tunnel led out into the cold, dark desert that was the planet's surface. The other led into the heart of the machine-controlled outpost 18.

"Surface world it is, then," she muttered to herself.

X-X-X

He was close. He could feel it.

He held a cloud of data block registers around his right glove. Though they weren't all from the point-origin, the trend at any one time was constant pull towards a building several blocks over.

It was proving increasingly difficult to get to. Apparently the Architect had laid safeguards against people moving towards Servers with too much purpose in their movements.

As he stepped onto the street, a car sped towards him, skidding out of control. He yelped in shock, slamming his left hand up and discharging a spray of logic spikes. Far less subtle than self-replicating recursion, but instantly effective rather than the creeping decay that recursion brought.

The car slammed to a halt as if it had hit a brick wall, then fell to the ground. The logic spikes had apparently created an incredibly strong magnetic field right in front of his hand, which brought the car to a complete stop.

He sighed. He would have thought that someone named 'The Technomancer' would have been able to code more predictable logic spikes. But by their very nature, they were unpredictable. They were designed to break logical systems in whatever they hit - by any means necessary. He had seen logic spikes do everything from causing their target to disappear completely, to gluing their target to the floor, to destroying it in a colossal explosion.

"So. The Technomancer. What are you doing in these sectors?" Said a sterile voice behind him.

Technomancer turned. An agent was standing on the sidewalk. Though he had only fought him three times, he knew this agent far better than he wished. This agent, interestingly, was the only one that addressed Technomancer by his chosen name.

This particular agent was the most dangerous one he had ever encountered. His name, predictably, was 'Root'. Technomancer sometimes wondered if 'Agent Root' represented the Architect himself... or, worse, Sysadmin.

Technomancer had encountered Sysadmin once, and only once. He had never risked going near the colossal, imposing Black Sun building again.

After all, who wants to pick a fight with the De Facto God of the matrix on his own turf?

Though he didn't wield the full power of Sysadmin (or if he did, he chose not to show it), agent Root was still a formidable enemy: He was the only agent that had ever forced Technomancer to drop the killswitch.

"Just what are you after, Technomancer?" Agent Root mused. "Morpheus and his team have an obvious goal, albeit a difficult one. But you are an enigma to us. And you must trust me when I say that makes you nearly unique."

"You obviously know who I am, Root, yet we aren't exchanging both blows and code-based attacks. What are YOU up to?"

"Oh, I am merely paying a visit on the way to... more important matters."

Technomancer picked up on the pause. Only one thing could be responsible for that.

"Neo being more trouble than you expected?" He said with an annoying grin on his face. "They really are sure he's the One."

Agent Root's voice remained as emotionless as ever, but his in his eye, a single green text character glowed for a fraction of a second - the equivalent of a human's eye twitching. Most people would not have noticed it, but Technomancer had grown observant during his many fights with other agents.

"Neo will be no more of a problem than any other interior operative." An interior operative was a human who worked against the machines from within the matrix.

"Oh, you must mean the hacker crews and... me, right?" Technomancer knew he was skating on thin ice, but he couldn't resist a dig at what might effectively be the Machine Emperor. "Of course, they've been just soooo easy to thwart in the past, haven't they?" He smirked.

For a minute, Agent Root actually glared. Technomancer felt a tiny triumphant feeling at getting an Agent to actually show emotion.

"I am needed elsewhere," said Agent Root cryptically. He vanished abruptly.

Technomancer almost shuddered with exhilaration. He had probably just made history, as the first human to ever succeed in using Misdirection against an inhuman intelligence; one of the lords of the matrix no less. He had been ready to drop the killswitch as soon as he saw Agent Root, but he had actually managed to distract him from the thought of stopping him.

He pressed a few buttons on his left glove, and, grinning with glee, he set off once again towards the white building.

X-X-X

Shard emerged from the sheltered tunnel. From what she knew of her old geography lessons, back when she had been a normal human battery among billions, she was in what had been New York city a hundred years ago. Apparently the city had been quite balmy on average.

It was easily thirty degrees below zero now. Frost adorned every inch of exposed rubble, and snowdrifts, mixed with dust and ancient ashes, were piled high against the few standing ruins by the bitter wind.

She set off, heading towards a cluster of lights in the eternal night. While it would invariably be a machine outpost, a tunnel which linked into Zion's tunnel network was probably not far from it.

X-X-X

Technomancer deftly vaulted over a fence.

Several pairs of footsteps sounded behind him. A voice called "halt!" And he heard a gun being cocked. He turned.

Several security guards were aiming assault rifles at him. He smiled, and conjured a single cube - a register's worth of data - from his right glove. Unlike the irridescent green of healthy matrix data, or the dull graphite color of his corruption, this data cube glowed a deep purple.

He had built this data procedure a while ago, but had never gotten around to loading a grenade or bullet with it. Its purpose was to interfere with the data connection that all matrix dwellers had. If it cut the connection slowly enough, the Matrixian did not die as soon as he jacked out.

Hopefully.

He hurled the cube. The security guard, not expecting it, didn't have time to dodge. As soon as the glowing purple object hit him, his figure faded to static, and then vanished with a pop.

The other guards opened fire.

Bullets dissolved into grey dust as they hit his torso armor. Corrupted matter - if you could stabilize it against the automatic deletion that was the fate of all entities the main system recognized as corrupted - was amazingly useful as an indiscriminately destructive material, since its corrupted nature spread easily to other objects which weren't stabilized by means of erroneous program interaction.

He threw two more disruptors, freeing two more minds. As he turned to the last guard, however, he saw the man's body blur.

He had a short sword in his hand before the agent had even gotten its bearings. The blade gleamed, and malevolent red characters flickered across it. He had drawn his most deadly weapon.

Technomancer had whimsicaly named this blade 'Asherah', after the Sumerian goddess. Unlike the sterile grey corruption, this cyberweapon was evil by design. It was a beautiful, sadistic hierarchy of carefully constructed computer viruses.

And these viruses were truly virulent. Technomancer had designed Asherah for the express purpose of attacking servers, but it worked well against agents, too. An infected agent wasn't deleted the way a corrupted one was, because the architect had not anticipated computer viruses in the matrix and therefore built no safeguards.

Depending on how much malware took root in a wound, the agent could be dead from terminal malfunction in seconds or months. But in that time, assuming it was more than a few minutes, the viruses caused irreparable damage to the agent's mind, sometimes changing its loyalty, and sometimes driving it destructively insane.

Better yet, if the agent survived long enough to send any kind of message, the viruses could potentially spread far and wide throughout the subsystem. Technomancer smiled as he remembered a massive 'pandemic' in Matrixian Asia. That particular virus had even destabilized the server itself; the area had been evacuated, but Technomancer had snuck in for a look. He remembered a lot of flickering.

The agent's voice broke through his thoughts. "Mr. Graves, I'm afraid you will have to come with me..."

He twitched. He hated being called anything but Technomancer.

He threw a nonsensical data grenade, leaping backwards to avoid contaminating himself. The agent, unfortunately, had been warned against his cyberwarfare, and jumped several meters backwards as well.

The Human and the AI circled each other around the black nothingness of a recent deletion.

The agent, who Technomancer vaguely recognized as a high-ranking one, jumped forward.

Technomancer couldn't react in time. The agent grabbed him, pinning his arms to the concrete.

"So, Mr. Graves, I guess this is the end of the line for you," said the agent in a satisfied voice.

Technomancer kicked him in the crotch. Although the agent did not feel pain, per se, Technomancer had modified his simulacra to, when in combat, discharge a huge amount of warning signals through whatever it hit, stunning it for a few seconds. He pushed the blank-faced agent off him.

"That's not even my name, you piece of programmed shit," he hissed. As the agent recovered and jumped forwards once more, he grazed the program's wrist with Asherah.

Irridescent red streams of data erupted from the wound, looking remarkably like blood. When it touched walls or floor, it slowed, but still festered and decayed the surface, clashing almost amusingly with the flickering emerald of the healthy code.

The agent looked at his poisoned hand, obviously not realizing that it was doomed. "Interesting, but I really think that the corruption worked better."

"I'm sure it did," said Technomancer, containing a smile. One stream of virulent, poisonous code had found its way to the agent's ear. He calculated that the agent would be dead in under two minutes.

The agent swung at him again. But this time, he stood still, playing chicken with the agent's fist.

Just before it made contact with his face, the agent's hand unraveled, splitting and dissolving into flying particles of toxic red code. Technomancer pushed himself backwards quickly; he might be immune to his data corruption, but he had programmed Asherah with one truly lethal purpose. He knew she wouldn't show her creator any more mercy than her victims.

The agent stared as its arm kept unravelling. As it reached its torso, it began to gibber and scream.

Within a minute there was nothing left but a smear of toxic code on the tiles, and the red malware that was slowly decaying the walls and buildings. If anyone came near here and left again, there might be another pandemic - unfortunately, Asherah could kill a human who was jacked in as easily as she could kill an agent. Despite his remarkably cynical, cold attitude towards Matrixians who were 'unaware', he still didn't want to indiscriminately kill them.

He pulled out a white data cube. This packet of data could usually heal the simulacra of anyone still living, no matter how badly injured they were. It could not help the dead, however.

Technomancer had found that the repair procedures of the revitalizing code was the only antidote to Asherah besides an immediate jackout and construction of a completely new simulacra, which could take months.

The white cube could only cure a certain level of infection in a human - but it could wash contamination from a 'dead' matrixian entity easily. A few applications was all it took to clean the creeping death from the concrete surroundings.

Technomancer sighed, readying a recursion bomb. Then he set off once again in the direction of the server.

X-X-X

Shard crawled.

She hated the feeling of crawling, but with assault sentinels only an inch of steel away from her, she didn't have much choice.

Scurrying along as quickly as possible, she soon came to an exit to the tunnel under the trash. She couldn't see any sentinels immediately around the opening. She gingerly poked her head out.

She was in a tiny cave, composed mostly of rubble. What shocked her most, however, was the fact that on the other side of the cave, not ten feet from her, was an unconscious young man in winter gear. He was curled up tightly, with a strange pen-shaped object in his mouth.

Not a man. A boy. While Shard herself was barely 21 years old, this boy couldn't be over eighteen.

What was he doing out here on the surface, on his own, deep within machine territory? Shard suddenly noticed that he was unarmed. He didn't even have a fluctuation tazer, for all the good it would have actually done him.

She leaned closer. Something about the boy's face held her gaze. He had a rare attribute; he had not lost his youthful, carefree energy, even despite having lost his innocent unawareness of the world's suffering a long time ago.

There was a clink. Sentinels must have been right above them. Shard kept very still.

After a few minutes, the sentinel moved on. She finally exhaled. She looked at the blinking light on the pen-like object clamped in the boy's mouth.

Making a decision, she took hold of the object and yanked it out.

X-X-X

Technomancer cautiously opened the door, Asherah at the ready.

"Technomancer..." came a voice behind him.

He turned. Agent Root had returned, and he had brought company. Five other agents stood st his side.

"Well, ain't this a little unfair," said Technomancer, toying with the pen in his mouth. In truth, he was nearly panicked. While the killswitch would get him out quickly, he knew that bringing his biological body up to speed in the real world would make him very detectable... and very vulnerable. He was torn: on one hand, he could fight here... on the agent's home country, sure, and against their most powerful warrior, but also a world of data where he had grown up with and understood; a place where he had weapons. On the other hand, he could pull the plug... and hope that the sentinels didn't notice him until he was somewhere safe.

Neither option seemed very appealing.

As the agents moved closer, his vision suddenly crackled with static. He felt a jerk on the pen, not of his own making, just before the world went black.

X-X-X

A resounding pain shot through Technomancer's head. Even with his heavily modified escape protocol, he still thanked god that he had survived every time he escaped via the killswitch.

After a few minutes, once the pain had subsided to the point that his other senses started to actually function, he noticed someone trying to speak to him.

"Are you alright? We need to move! It's a long walk to Zion, and this area is swarming with sentinels!" said a vaguely human voice.

Technomancer rolled over.

Through his hazed vision, he could see a human form. As his mind finally took full control of his optic nerves and the image focused, he realized that it was a woman.

"What?" He said, confused. "Zion?"

X-X-X

Shard couldn't believe her ears; the kid must be in jackout shock. "Um, yeah! The bastion of humanity? The last living city? Don't play dumb with me, kid. Get up."

"What's Zion?" He said, collecting a few pieces of unidentifiable technology.

Shard paused. "I hope you're kidding, because if you're not, you are in for the shock of your life." She listened for a moment. "No sentinels nearby. We had better move."

X-X-X

The drip of water echoed through the tunnel.

"So..." said the boy nervously. "What is this Zion place again?"

Shard was not amused. "I'm sick of your joke. Say that again and I'll shoot you right now."

He cringed. "I'm sorry! I'm not joking! Please, I really don't know where or what Zion is! I mean... you talked as if it was a city, but there aren't any cities left! And I would know; I've been all across north America."

"What? You... kid... have travelled postwar America for...?" She said questioningly.

"Eight years, give or take," he replied promptly. She almost believed him; his hair was over a foot long, he was painfully skinny and he was, overall, grimy enough to have been dragged through a sewer.

"And you never once got picked up by a ship? Wait a minute, you're a native Matrixian; You have plugs. How could you possibly escape without the help of a ship's crew?"

"Kernel Panic," he said instantly. She looked at him as if he had sprouted antennae.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"The system crashed, and I got ejected. Must have been a cascade failure, too, because I've never seen that section back online," he said as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

"You've jacked back in? On your own? How the hell have you survived? Or gotten back out again?"

"Well, my jack has the killswitch function, and I usually bring a safer disrupt protocol in with me," he said, not realizing that he had lost her completely. "And those squid things... well, just stay quiet, or jack yourself in, and they don't attack you. They don't attack people who are jacked in."

She just shook her head. "Nevermind. Keep quiet for now, okay?"

X-X-X

Shard pulled up short. "Here's our stop."

The boy looked unimpressed. "We've been walking down these tunnels for 5.45 hours towards a dead end?"

"Not a dead end," she said, hiding a smile. "Open up! It's Shard, from the 'Confidence'!" She yelled.

The boy cringed again. He was used to keeping very quiet.

The rubble suddenly shifted. A massive metal door, concealed by miscellaneous junk welded to its surface, slid open with a groan. Blinding white light flooded the dark tunnel.

As they walked forward, Shard abruptly said, "I'd put your hands up. They don't know you." As his vision painfully cleared, he saw that, indeed, several people were aiming various firearms at him.

Shard held up her hand, signalling them to stand down. "We need to speak with the council; The 'Confidence' was destroyed by sentinels and I am the only survivor."

"What about this boy?" Asked one of the armed men.

"I... encountered him, on my trek back here. He's the main reason I want to see the council." The enigmatic boy gave a small wave.

"Alright, I'll arrange it." The man paused. "And Shard? Thanks for making it back alive."

X-X-X

Shard pulled the strange boy along with her.

"Where are we going?" He whined. "I've only been in utopia for five minutes before somebody's ordering me around!"

"Shut up, you idiot," She snapped. It was hard to stay angry with him, though, especially in Zion. He had called that one with good aim; it truly was a utopia.

She pulled him towards a pair of conspicuously large steel doors. They whispered open at their approach.

X-X-X Chapter 2 X-X-X

The council members gazed at the two young adults who had requested an audience.

After a few minutes, in which Shard wondered if the wait was just for the amusement of the council members, one of them spoke.

"Your name is Shard, you are a native Matrixian, and your last working assignment was as a backup interior operative aboard the Zionite ship 'Confidence', now reported to have been destroyed while on a mission. Am I correct?"

"Yes, counsellor," replied Shard, formally if nervously.

"You are the only reported survivor of the attack?"

"Y- yes, counsellor," she replied, he voice almost cracking. It had just struck her that she would never see her friends again.

"Then who is this boy you brought home with you?"

"I... I found him, unconscious, while crawling through some tunnels in the surface rubble. I removed some strange pen-like object from his mouth..." - Shard heard the boy gasp - "...and he woke up almost instantly. He claimed to have no knowledge of Zion's existence and that he had been alone on the surface world for eight years."

"I see," said one of the counsellors. "What is your name, boy?"

The young man finally spoke up. "Technomancer, sir."

A gasp ran around the room. Shard had previously had no idea that her charge, so helpless in the real world, had been the enigmatic hacker whom she had heard about.

Technomancer, sometimes said with the honorific 'The', wasn't a legend the way Neo was, but most interior operatives at least heard about him at some point in their lives. Shard's captain had even once planned an operation on the basis that Technomancer was online in a different area, and the agents would be too busy with him.

The old man leaned forward. "So. You are the fabled Technomancer? The man that, once, destabilized western Europe and Asia? The man who fought something that even we don't comprehend in the black sun building? The man who, apparently, kills agents with impunity?"

"Y- yes, sir. I... I didn't know I was such a celebrity, sir."

The old man chuckled. "Among the interior operatives, you are quite well known - although with the unplugging of Neo, I imagine that people may have forgotten you. Your activities have been of great use to Zion, both directly and by the diversions they cause."

Another council member spoke up. "By accepting our hospitality, he has agreed to abide by our rule. To whom shall he be assigned?"

The old man grinned, as if he had gotten a joke that no-one else had noticed. "Oh, Shard has proven herself well able to take care of him," he said. "Shard, report at the hangar for a new assignment. Technomancer, you will go with her."

X-X-X

Shard opened one of the quite ordinary-looking doors. The space beyond it, however, was massive. Technomancer gazed in awe at the ships.

There were warships, though hardly many. There were small scout ships. There were cruisers. There was even what looked like a destroyer in the center, surrounded by technicians.

He didn't have much time to gawk, however. Shard grabbed his wrist and dragged him over to a desk, which seemed horribly out of place amongst the smell of oil and ozone.

"Shard and Technomancer, here for assignment," she said crisply.

The hawk-like woman looked at them. She had never heard of Technomancer before.

"Huh, he looks pretty useless! Still, I hear you're supposed to be assigned together..." she looked at a message on her desk. "...operative leader? Right of the bat? You're an impressive little schmuck."

Shard cut her off. "Just the assignment, please," she said in an icy voice.

"Humph." She scanned her notes again. "You're very lucky; I have two new openings for your skills on the 'Riven'. That big one in the center. Now get out of my face."

Technomancer just stared. He had been assigned to what was probably the most advanced ship in Zion!

He was so lost in thought that he didn't notice when shard grabbed his wrist again, for the third time that day.

X-X-X

Shard was impressed. The 'Riven' was easily twice the size of the 'Confidence', and it was considerably more lethal. Its armor was thick enough to pose a significant obstacle to even a snake-class sentinel, and as well as EMP, it had two turrets sporting conventional 4.5 inch guns.

Technomancer, however, had already lost interest in the technical side. He was seated in the operator's chair, typing so fast that his fingers were blurry.

Shard looked over his shoulder. "What are you typing?" She asked.

He looked at her oddly. "Um, some program upgrades? I thought it would be obvious."

She frowned. "That doesn't look like matrix code. It isn't green, for one thing."

Technomancer laughed out loud. Shard was taken aback.

"That's not computer code! That's just streaming visuals on your computers, which aren't powerful enough resolve the value entries into a simulation. THIS is source code," he said proudly. "Coded in Lisp - List-processing language - and designed, in this case, to creatively circumvent the rules laid down by the Architect."

Shard stared, uncomprehending, at the masses of parentheses.

Maybe Technomancer was more important than he looked...

Her thoughts were cut short by the ship's captain.

"Who are these two freaks, and what is this one doing in the operator's chair?" He growled.

Technomancer whirled, an impressive feat for someone in a sitting position. He was cringing.

Shard saved him the brunt of the force, however. "We've been assigned to this ship. He's leader of interior operations, I'm a backup operative and real-world soldier."

Though the captain did not look pleased at the 'leader of interior operations' line, a good real world soldier was RARE. He made no more fuss about it.

"Well, I have to know my crew. What are your names?"

"I'm Shard, he's Technomancer," she replied.

The effect was immediate. "THE Technomancer?"

"Yes." Shard was beginning to wonder if this would happen every time.

"You know, for someone who didn't even know that Zion existed until yesterday, I sure seem well known there," remarked Technomancer sardonically.

"Shut up, Technomancer," said Shard sharply.

X-X-X

The 'Riven' slid softly out of the dock.

As she accelerated through the gates of Zion, most of her crew was asleep, or at least off-shift. Sleep was the last thing on Shard's mind, however.

She couldn't get Technomancer's innocent, smiling face out of her head.

She knew now, after hearing him talk, that the smile was a facade. It was born of a combination of childish disregard for suffering and enforced coldness toward the same. He had been a child when he had been jacked out, so he had never developed any real sense of community. He seemed to view other humans as... drones. If they were happy, fine, but if they were suffering, well, at least it wasn't him.

He wasn't heartless though. From what he'd said, he'd worked day and night to destroy the matrix. But in the process, he had become jaded. He was willing to risk many lives for a chance to attack the machines; that much was obvious when he had told her about Asherah.

He seemed to have a personal Vendetta against them!

She had heard him talk about them; she had seen his face. On the rare occasions that the machines came up in a conversation, his left eye would twitch and he would grip whatever he was holding so tightly that more often than not he would break it. He could barely speak of them without growling.

It was... perplexing. Most Zionites had no love for the machines, but Technomancer's hatred was bordering on obsessive. His only goal in his life seemed to be the destruction of the machine minds, at any cost.

Try as she might, she couldn't understand what could have caused such an all-encompassing drive for vengeance.

Shard looked at the clock. It was 3:51 am, Matrixian time. Her shift was in roughly three hours.

She groaned and rolled over, sleep finally taking her.

X-X-X

By the time Shard was up for duty, the 'Riven' was in position for jacking in.

She sleepily made her way to the bridge, to find Technomancer already there. He was curled up on one of the chairs, his eyes tightly shut. The strange blinking device was once again clamped between his teeth.

The captain appeared behind her. "We're going in here," he said, pointing at a bit-map which represented the matrix. "We are going for the unplugging of two individuals who appear to possess useful skills." He paused. "What is Technomancer doing?"

The operator, a Zionite native named Aeon, was staring at the streaming data. "He's... already jacked in. He seems to be travelling north..."

"That's not possible. You can see for yourself that he isn't plugged in."

Aeon looked worried. "He's playing hide and seek with agents, by the look of it!" She exclaimed. "What is he hoping to accomplish?"

The captain and the rest of the crew gathered around the streaming display.

As Aeon was trying frantically to set up a comm channel to Technomancer, the streams of data abandoned their carefree falling pattern and started to whirl and spiral with an eerie vigour.

Then, they changed from their verdant color to an evil graphite-grey.

Aeon almost jumped out of her chair. "What in God's name is that?"

Shard leaned closer. "I think...

"It's corrupted data," concluded Aeon. "But what's the source?"

The agent's pattern was grazed by one of the reasonless splashes of corruption. The code structure began to disintegrate, and within minutes there was nothing left.

Aeon stared in shock. "He... he killed an agent."

Other, less identifiable patterns started to converge on Technomancer's unique pattern, which compressed, reordered and abruptly winked out of existence.

"What the hell just happened?" Shouted the captain.

"It looked like a manual jackout," said Aeon nervously, "but it was slightly slower... he might have survived..."

They heard a groan. Shard whirled.

Technomancer gradually unfolded himself. The strange black rod fell to the floor.

"What were you thinking?" The captain roared.

Technomancer slowly got to his feet. There was a fire in his eyes. "I have a mission," he said coldly, "which is more important than anything you have ever done. Do not presume to question my activities, Captain." He spat the last word.

X-X-X

Shard woke up abruptly. She could see her breath in the air.

She quickly got dressed, putting on two extra sweaters, and headed toward the reactor.

When she got there, Aeon, the captain and several other crew members were already working furiously. "What happened?" She asked.

The captain answered. "A God-damned interlock failed. We've been working for an hour with no luck. We're lucky to even have lighting."

Technomancer wandered in, looking sleepy. He was wearing light cotton as opposed to the heavy wool of the crew.

"What's all the fuss, guys?" He asked.

Shard replied without looking up. "The reactor failed. We've got to get it working again before we all freeze to death."

Technomancer looked puzzled. "It's not very cold. There's only frost on the walls, not all across the floor and ceiling."

Shard looked up. "What do you mean, 'it's not very cold'? You said it yourself; there's frost on the walls!" She suddenly noticed what he was wearing.

He looked disdainful. "Not cold enough for me to wear winter gear."

Shard was about to reply, but then remembered that he had spent eight years roaming the icy wastelands with much less protection than an unheated Zionite ship.

"Got it!" Exclaimed one of the crew proudly. "The interlock's back online. It's safe to bring the power back up."

X-X-X

It was time to jack in. Riven's mission today was to track down a prominent scientist and unplug her.

Technomancer, Shard and two other operatives - named Claw and Screamer, respectively - lay back into their jack-in chairs. Technomancer, of course, refused the head-plug in favor of his dental nerve jack, which he quickly calibrated to the frequency of the Riven's pirate broadcast.

The world shifted...

The four operatives found themselves in a container yard beside several colossal cranes. To the west, a huge ship was being loaded with cargo.

Technomancer turned to face the others; his tall, imperious simulacra providing a striking contrast to his weak and submissive real-world self. In the real world, he was a refugee, but in the matrix, he was a soldier at war.

"Alright, crew. I may be the technical leader of this outfit, but I have my own agenda. Once we've pilled this babe, I'm heading off. Claw, it's up to you to get the crew out alive."

Claw's perpetual schizophrenic smile broadened. "We'll get out okay, but I can't promise it'll be stealthy."

"It doesn't have to be, as long as you are all alive. Now let's unplug this scientist."

"It's just north of your position," said Aeon over their communicators. She sounded impatient.

The crew moved towards a high-rise building in the distance.

Although the way seemed entirely uneventful to the others, Technomancer was on full alert. He could see encrypted message lines opening and then closing too fast for him to get in. The agents were planning something.

He wasn't terribly surprised when three agents materialized in front of the group.

"Break off, guys. I'll deal with these," said Technomancer. Screamer, however, stood his ground. He drew two beautiful pistols.

"Screamer, I said to break off."

"No can do, Techie. Root's gonna be here soon. You can't take them all."

"You can't take them AT all!"

Screamer wasn't fazed. "The Oracle told me that I would have to run or die for my crew. Well, I've heard about you, and I know what you fight for, and if you are part of it, I chose my crew. Now get lost." The agents were advancing. Technomancer noticed six new portal protocols; one of which was definitely Root.

Technomancer touched Screamer's pistol with his right glove. "That might help a bit: if you hit one, it'll stay dead." He turned and ran after Claw and Shard.

Screamer faced the agents. "I may be a dead man, but I'll be damned if I can't drag one of you to hell with me. Let's dance."

Surprisingly, he managed to kill two agents before Root got behind him and tore him apart.

X-X-X

After a few minutes of running, Technomancer caught up with the rest of the crew.

"Took you long enough!" Commented Shard. "Where's Screamer?"

"He... elected to stay behind," said Technomancer.

Aeon broke in over Technomancer. "He sacrificed himself." Claw and Shard gasped. "Nine agents were teleporting to our position. He threw them off, so we're safe for now. But keep moving!"

X-X-X

In a matter of minutes, the team had gotten to the arranged meeting point: an abandoned laboratory. Technomancer looked around, his eyes bright with the possibilities that the detailed scientific equipment held. He wandered over to a large, dusty meson accelerator, fiddling with tiny particles of data.

He was vaguely aware of Shard talking to the scientist they had met. She looked shocked. He imagined they all did, one way or another. It had certainly come as a shock to him when his little entry error had crashed the system, triggering the cascade failure - and his body started to disintegrate.

He snapped out of his reverie. Quick as a snake, he grabbed a passing message, tearing it apart.

'Blah blah... data exchange... damn, these messages always contain so much bullshit...' he muttered angrily.

He found an important piece quickly enough, however. '...interior operatives... abandoned laboratory? They know we're here!' He almost shouted the last part. He quickly made his way over to Shard.

"Not to put the pressure on, but there's going to be a little trouble here in about five minutes," he whispered over her shoulder.

"Thanks," she replied sourly. He briefly noticed she had two pills in her hand.

He strode over to the window. A car was pulling up outside the building. Two identical cars were approaching as well. Luckily, Technomancer couldn't sense Agent Root amount them.

He briefly toyed with the idea of using Asherah, or one of her viral children, against the agents. He quickly dismissed the thought. His crew-mates were too near, too easily affected by the lethal red poison.

Listen to yourself, he thought. Four days ago you would have cared not an iota for anything that got in your way. Now, you are actually considering the danger of your actions to others...

He conjured his trademark pistol: tailored to kill agents or other, less identifiable entities. The bullets traveled fast - almost three times as fast as a regular armor-piercing assault rifle round - and they were laced with corruption in the form of kinetic reaction properties that did not conform to Matrixian physics. They would only kill low-ranking agents, but they usually stunned even a top tier agent like root.

Even with the extra speed, though, they didn't hit often.

He turned to look at the others, just in time to see the scientist flicker and vanish. He was intrigued, but he had more pressing matters on hand.

"Run!" He yelled, and leaned out the window.

He fired. The drawn-out 'pkow' of his pistol was quickly punctuated by the much deeper boom of the agent's desert eagles.

The graphite-grey bullets slammed into the concrete and the car's panelling. One such bullet found its way to an agent's shoulder. The entity stopped and twitched as it struggled to purge itself of the confusing, idiosyncratic kinetic responses.

Technomancer felt the swish of a large bullet skimming past his face. He jerked back from the window, smashing his left glove across the frame. The booby-trap wasn't much, but he felt better for having laid it.

He headed for the stairs, only to run headfirst into an agent. His hand snapped up, and the agent fell with a corrupted bullet between its eyes.

Stairs not being an option, Technomancer turned and ran deeper into the building.

A blast of logic spikes turned a door into more of a light nuisance than an obstacle. Technomancer found himself in one of the large equipment storage rooms.

He ran behind an old plasma generator, and pulled out his phone. "Aeon! Did the crew get out alright?"

"Well, Screamer's dead, but you knew that. Claw and Shard got to an exit - the agents are too busy chasing you. We're picking up their charge right now.

"As for your situation... you killed the two agents you hit, or at least, drove them away. You still have four..." - she paused - "...third-tier agents on your tail. I hope you're up for a fight, because you have no time to get to an exit."

"If the worst comes to the worst, I'll drop the killswitch," he muttered. "Thanks, Aeon. It's quite nice knowing more than the Intel you steal."

"Anytime," she said. "Uh oh. I don't think this line is secure. Bye." She hung up quickly.

He dissolved his pistol into random data. He then conjured Asherah. The red characters glittered malevolently in the dim light.

The agents burst into the storage room.

One of them spotted Technomancer. It leapt forward and struck him in the torso.

Silver liquid started to flow across his simulacra's chest. He slammed his left glove across it as if he was trying to stop a wound from bleeding.

Surprisingly, it worked to some extent. The creeping silver slowed, but did not stop. He only had a few more minutes.

He only needed a few more. Technomancer spun to face the next attack, slashing the agent's upper arm as he ducked. Poison began to trickle from the wound.

Technomancer whirled, facing the other three agents. As he did so, a bullet slammed into his torso, having hit a chink in his corrupt armor.

He grimaced from pain, stabbing upwards. The agent almost dodged, but Technomancer was just a shade too fast for him. The lethal red blade sliced a long cut across the agent's chest. It fell, gibbering and screaming, as the malevolent code began to decay its structure.

The other two agents grabbed his arms.

He twisted his left arm, grabbing the agent's wrist with his gloved hand. He discharged a logic spike.

The agent twitched, and its head jerked, but its grip didn't loosen.

Technomancer grunted as he struggled, finally twisting himself to a point where he could see the agent's hand. He slammed his forehead into the button.

The agent started glitching. It finally released him as its hand began decaying into grey dust.

X-X-X

-cliffhanger-!

I finally uploaded this, because, honestly, I don't know if I'll ever continue it... if you're interested in taking over the story, message me. 


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